I'm a member of the Forbes wealth team, covering the world's richest people. I'm also the author of Forbes' first graphic novel, The Zen of Steve Jobs. Previously, I've written for the Chicago Tribune and The Times of South Africa. My alma mater is Northwestern University's Medill School, which has recently altered its name to include a rambling string of words that I cannot be bothered to remember. Follow @CalebMelby and/or circle me on Google+

A Week Without (Real) Food: Watch Me Test Drive The Soylent Diet

On May 24, Soylent Corporation, the startup founded by Rob Rhinehart, took to Crowdhoster to raise $100,000 to jump-start its food replacement product. The company raised that much money in three hours and has since more than quadrupled its funding goal.

Soylent is the latest darling in the quantified self movement. Rhinehart says he’s survived almost entirely on the stuff for three months and that doing so has improved almost every facet of his being: whiter teeth, lower weight, better muscle/fat ratio, less dandruff, less fragrant body gas, more clarity, more curiosity, more focus, more energy, etc. Rhinehart told Gawker that Y Combinator founder Paul Graham called it “the pivot of the century.” A handful of anonymous, positive reviews sit on Soylent’s fundraising site.

Rhinehart is confident in the efficacy of his 39 ingredient concoction — even though others are not. “Several academics contacted for this story were so skeptical about Soylent, that they refused even to be interviewed about it,” wrote The Telegraph in early May. Still others insist that Soylent’s product exists already — in the form of medical food fed to everyone from the comatose to hunger-striking prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Despite all the criticism, Soylent is now sitting on $425,000 — which it will use to jump-start its post-food movement. There’s just one problem. While Soylent has open-sourced its ingredient list, and is running tests with a small cadre of volunteers, nobody has bothered to publicly, independently confirm Rhinehart’s health claims. And that’s a long list of health claims. History has a name for products that profess to improve so many disparate aspects of the human condition: snake oil. Which is not to say that Soylent is snake oil. It just sounds too good to be true.

There is, of course, only one way to settle this score, Dear Internet.

And I will be your humble guinea pig.

While some have poked fun at Soylent’s taste and consistency, neither are at the heart of efficiency-obsessed Rhinehart’s master plan. He’s interested in affordable, sustainable super-nutrition. And hey, if Soylent does everything he says it does, I’m interested too (maybe I can mix some sriracha or chocolate sauce into the reportedly bland mixture). So today I start a week of subsisting solely — provided my willpower prevails — on Soylent. I will keep you up to date on my energy, health and hunger levels both on Twitter and on this blog with the help of the Forbes video team. In an hour, Rhinehart will arrive to the Forbes offices to administer my first full Soylent meal (“soyfast?” “breaklent?”). We’ll get that video up ASAP.

I should be a pretty good test case for Rhinehart’s claims. He’s 6’3. I’m 6’4. My current weight is nearly identical to his at the start of his three-month Soylent stint. He jogs a little more than three miles daily, which is roughly the length of the jog I do in my Brooklyn neighborhood 3-5 nights a week. Soylent plans to create customizable mixes with the money it has raised, but until then, the mixture that Rhinehart has created for himself should serve me quite nicely.

We differ in one major way — our relationship with food. “In my own life I resented the time, money, and effort the purchase, preparation, consumption, and clean-up of food was consuming,” Rhinehart writes on his blog. I too hate grocery shopping (hell hath no torture like 14th Street Trader Joe’s on a Monday night), but I consider cooking to be a meditative, creative activity. And I’m good at it. Or, at least, better than my roommates. I eat pretty healthy: dairy-less fruit smoothies and coffee in the morning, sandwiches for lunch, nuts throughout the day, a meal normally centered around beans, brussel sprouts, kale or spinach at night. Like Rhinehart, I find a little bit of bacon goes a long way. But if I don’t pack a lunch (because I didn’t want to go to the grocery store), Murray’s Bagels, Chipotle and SubwaySubway are my go-to substitutes (I genuinely enjoy Murray’s and Chipotle, but it’s hard to beat Subway on price). I hypothesize that as I have a more loving relationship with food, I will crave “real” food more often and more seriously than Rhinehart does.

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Seriously? Soylent is the name of this company? Should I be concerned if they press the product into little flat green squares and distribute them? Why would anyone take this company seriously when it clearly seems this whole thing is an inside be a joke?